Underwater image restoration by color compensation and color-line model

The images captured underwater suffer from low contrast and color distortion owing to the harsh underwater imaging environment. An underwater image restoration algorithm is introduced in this paper based on color compensation and color-line model. Firstly, color compensation method is proposed to compensate the attenuated color information and improve the accuracy of estimated color lines. Secondly, the relationship of three-channel transmission is derived from the association between the global background light and the inherent optical characteristics. Then, an underwater image local transmission optimization model is established in light of the color line law to acquire local transmission map. Finally, the restoration images are performed by inverting the form of the simplified imaging model. Experimental results show that our method is superior to other methods in subjective evaluation, objective evaluation, color accuracy tests and application tests. This method can obtain images with significantly enhanced visibility and higher color fidelity.